Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
The Failure of the Church Yet a third factor played an important role in this historical development, in addition to the imperial adoption of icons and the rise of the icons of the holy man. Brown writes: "The great Christian basilicas of the previous centuries tended to stand empty, except…
The three large patriarchal narratives of Genesis concern the three aspects of the cosmos: matter, space, and time. Over these three is man given dominion. Lucifer was originally appointed to train man in this dominion, but he chose to lead man into rebellion instead. Thus, the Angel of Yahweh replaced…
Part 6: Living in a Dying World (continued) The "Trivium" (continued) The five stages of education are simply the five stages of the covenant as God administers it in human life and history, and in the liturgy of covenant renewal: First, God announces Himself. "I am Yahweh Your God." He…
The following essay is tentative and exploratory, offered for your consideration. It seems to me that the ritual of the Ascension Offering (incorrectly translated as Burnt Offering) of Leviticus 1 is a symbolic recapitulation of Genesis 1, which thereby portrays the sacrificial ritual as way of moving from a fallen…
Just as the vast majority of evangelical Christians in America today are Arminian and Baptist, so the vast majority do not believe in a creation around 4000 BC. I don’t expect any of these three situations to change anytime soon. Powerful presuppositions are at work in all three instances, along…
The Iconoclastic Controversy Continuing Pagan Influence How did images creep in? To begin with, there was in the post-Constantinian Church a concerted effort on the part of the semi-pagans to interpret Christianity in essentially pantheistic terms. The heretics put God and man on a continuum of "being," so that God…
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The first “not good” thing in the Bible is Adam’s isolation and aloneness (Genesis 2:18). It’s the one discordant “not good” in a string of “goods” that ends with a “very good.” Later, Jethro tells Moses that spending his day judging the people without any help is “not good” (Exodus…
Isaiah charges that Judah has become a rebellious son, and enumerates the rebellions 65:2-5: 1) They walk in a way that is not good. 2) They follow their own thoughts. 3) They provoke Yahweh to His face. 4) The sacrifice in gardens. 5) They burn incense on bricks. 6) They…
The Washington Post reports on a study that assesses the impact of religious affiliation on job applications. “Researchers Michael Wallace, Bradley R.E. Wright and Allan Hyde of the University of Connecticut sent 3,200 fake applications to 800 jobs within 150 miles of two major Southern cities through a popular employment…
Back in 1952, AHN Green-Armytage wrote this splendid description of the world of critical scholarship: “There is a world - I do not say a world in which all scholars live but one at any rate into which all of them sometimes stray, and which some of them seem permanently…
Adriaan Vlok was minister of law and order in South Africa during the apartheid years. As the New Republic reports, he is making amends in a dramatic way. He recently visited one of his victims, Frank Chikane, a black minister: “He’d written it on the front flyleaf of a Bible.…
Jesus taught His disciples to pray to “our Father,” and that has rightly been given a Christological gloss: Jesus and His disciples address a common Father. But that form of address is not wholly unprecedented. Twice Isaiah refers to a group that addresses Yahweh as “our Father” (63:16; 64:8). The…
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